The 2020 presidential election is only getting closer. Now, there’s another new poll out painting exactly the kind of hard time that incumbent President Donald Trump might have when he gets there. According to Emerson College, Trump has ten percent less support in the “battleground” state of Colorado than three of the current top five Democratic presidential primary candidates. These include former Vice President Joe Biden, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, and South Bend, Indiana’s Mayor Pete Buttigieg. All of them garnered 55 percent of the polled support to Trump’s 45 percent.
Trump trailed the other two leading Democratic presidential candidates in the same poll, but by smaller margins. He managed only 46 percent of the support to Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren’s 53 percent, giving her a seven percent advantage. California Senator Kamala Harris, meanwhile, had 51 percent of the support to 48 percent for Trump — which is within the poll’s margin of error.
In the 2016 presidential election, Hillary Clinton won Colorado by almost five percent, but the state is not as Democratic as say, California, and it’s been perceived as a battleground. Republicans rallied enough to get Cory Gardner elected to the Senate in 2014, at which time he defeated a Democratic incumbent, Tom Udall.
Gardner is now up for re-election, and his campaign is on shaky ground, although it’s well-funded, with almost $5 million in his campaign account as of late August. Former Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper recently dropped out of the Democratic presidential primary, and the same Emerson College poll that gave multiple Democratic presidential candidates large advantages over Trump in hypothetical 2020 match-ups placed Hickenlooper at 53 percent of the support to only 40 percent for Gardner in a hypothetical general election match-up between those two. The implications of that poll aren’t exactly ambiguous — although Hickenlooper would still have to win the Democratic Senate primary race to get to that point.
There’s also the Democratic presidential primary to still get through before any candidate faces off with Trump. In this same poll, Emerson College found a sharply competitive Democratic presidential primary race within Colorado, which votes as part of the “Super Tuesday” round of primaries, in which many other states do the same on the same day. In Colorado, the pollsters found that Sanders had 26 percent of the support, Biden had 25 percent of the support, and Warren had 20 percent. The only other candidate to break double digits in the state was Harris, who managed 13 percent.
These numbers are somewhat similar to national polling averages, although there is some variation. Across recent polls, Biden managed an average of about 29 percent of the support, Sanders and Warren each grabbed about 15 percent — and they are the only candidates to on average break double digits on a national level. Biden has consistently been popular with older voters, Sanders’s base of support has been with younger voters, while Warren’s support has proven more evenly spread across age groups.
Trump has already spent time attacking all of them, from his “Pocahontas” nickname for Warren to his repeated insinuations that Biden isn’t mentally fit for the presidency.
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